The internationalization of African studies: A view from the SSRC

Africa Today

Volumn 44, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 155-162

  Kassimir, Ron ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0031495492     PISSN: 00019887     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (10)

1. Jane I. Guyer, "African Studies: A New Tradition?" ISSUE: A Journal of Opinion 23, no. 1 (1995), p. 14 (emphasis mine).
2. See Kenneth Prewitt, "Presidential Items," ITEMS 50, nos. 1,2-3, and 4 (1996).
3. See Prewitt, "Presidential Items," ITEMS 50, no. 4 (1996). For clarification, the IDRF competition as well as the Advanced Research Grants funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities are open to all regions. For some regions, there are other fellowship competitions offered by the Councils, both doctoral and postdoctoral, which receive separate funding from donors. Africa is not one of these regions. The new international program does not preclude the possibility of specific funding for African research in the future, if such opportunities should arise.
4. Jane I. Guyer, with the help of Akbar M. Virmani and Amanda Kemp, African Studies in the United States: A Perspective (Atlanta: African Studies Association Press, 1996), p. 31. And, it could be added, this makes both the careful study of these phenomena by scholars engaged in basic research and dialogue between them and applied researchers and practitioners even more critical.
5. Robert H. Bates, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Jean O'Barr, eds., Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
6. Guyer, African Studies in the United States, p. 60.
7. Recently an announcement of an All-Russia Conference of Africanists, to be held in Moscow in October 1997, was sent out over the Internet.
8. It also enhances comparative possibilities. In the case of the former Soviet Union, on issues such as structural adjustment and privatization of economies, environmental and health matters, democratic transitions, and ethnic conflict, the parallels with Africa are clear (as for Africanists, so is the potential of scholarship on Africa to inform debates in and on these regions).
9. As Guyer notes, international forces have not been neutral in the creation of these conditions. "Structural adjustment policy-makers seem to have predicted neither an African brain-drain as professional salaries plummeted nor the collapse of funding for the universities" when, it could be argued, this was an inevitable result of SAP prescriptions. Guyer, "African Studies: A New Tradition?" p. 14.
10. As Pearl T. Robinson has indicated in her contribution to this issue, collaborative initiatives are under way with CODESRIA on training opportunities for junior African scholars.